Playing Video

Using xine

With xine started, right-click in the xine window to see the controls. The quickest way to play video is to click one of the following buttons, then press the Play button (right arrow or play, depending on the skin you are using):

• VCD (looks for a video CD)

• DVD (looks for a DVD in /dev/dvd)

• CDA (looks a music CD in /dev/cdaudio)

Next, you can use the Pause/resume, Stop, Play, Fast motion, Slow motion, or Eject buttons to work with video. You can also use the Previous and Next buttons to step to different tracks. The controls are very similar to what you would expect on a physical CD or DVD player.

To select individual files, or to put together your own list of content to play, you can use the Playlist feature.

Creating playlists with xine

Click the Playlist button on the left side of the xine control window. A Playlist Editor appears, showing the files on your current playlist. You can add and delete content from this list, then save the list to call on later. Here's how you use the xine Playlist Editor:

• CDA, DVD, or VCD — Click any of the buttons that represent a particular CD or DVD. All content from that CD or DVD is added to the playlist.

• Add — Click the Add button to see the MRL Browser window. From that window, click File to choose a file from your Linux file system to add to the list. Click Select to add that file to the Playlist Editor.

• Move up/ Move down — Use the Move up selected MRL and Move down selected MRL buttons to move up and down the playlist.

• Delete — Click the Delete Selected MRL button to remove the current selection.

• Delete all — Click the Delete All Entries button to clear the whole playlist.

• Save — Click the Save button to save the playlist to your home directory ($HOME/.xine/playlist).

• Load — To read in the playlist you saved, click the Load button.

The xine content is identified as media resource locators (MRLs). Each MRL is identified as a file, DVD, or VCD. Files are in the regular file path (/path/file) or preceded by a file:/, fifo:/, or stdin:/. DVDs and VCD are preceded by dvd and vcd, respectively (for example, vcd://01).

To play your playlist, click the Play button (arrow key) on the Playlist Editor.

Xine tips

Getting video and audio to work properly can sometimes be a tricky business. Here are a few quick tips if you are having trouble getting xine to work properly (or at all):

• Xine won't start — To work best, xine needs an X driver that supports OpenGL. If there is no OpenGL support for your video card in X, xine will shut down immediately when it tries to open the default Xv driver. If this happens to you, try starting xine with the X11 video driver (which is slower, but should work) as follows:

  $ xine -VXSHM
  

• Xine playback is choppy — If playback of files from you hard disk is choppy, there are a couple of settings you can check: 32-bit IO and DMA. (If these two features are supported by your hard disk, they will generally improve hard disk performance.)

  Caution?

  Improper disk settings can result in destroyed data on your hard disk. Do this procedure at your own risk. This procedure is only for IDE hard drives (NO SCSI)! Also, be sure to have a current backup and no activity on your hard disk if you change DMA or IO settings as described below.

  First, test the speed of hard disk reads. To test the first IDE drive (/dev/hda), type:

  # hdparm -t /dev/hda
  Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 19.31 seconds = 3.31 MB/sec

  To see your current DMA and IO settings, as root user type:

  # hdparm -c -d /dev/hda
  /dev/hda:
   I/O support = 0 (default 16-bit)
   using_dma   = 0 (off)

  This shows that both 32-bit IO and DMA are off. To turn them on, type:

  # hdparm -c 1 -d 1 /dev/hda
  /dev/hda:
   I/O support = 1 (32-bit)
   using_dma   = 1 (on)

  With both settings on, test the disk again:

  # hdparm -t /dev/hda
  Timing buffered disk reads: 64 MB in 2.2 seconds = 28.83 MB/sec

As you can see from this example, buffered disk reads of 64 MB went from 19.31 seconds to 2.2 seconds after changing the parameters described. Playback should be much better now.

• Xine won't play particular media — Messages such as "no input plug-in" mean that either the file format you are trying to play is not supported or it requires an additional plug-in (as is the case with playing DVDs). If the message is "maybe xyx is a broken file," the file may be a proprietary version of an otherwise supported format. For example, I had a Quicktime video fail that required an SVQ3 codec (which is currently not supported under Linux), though other Quicktime files will play fine.

  Note?

  The CrossOver Plugin (described in Chapter 9) can be used to play a variety of content, including the version of Quicktime just mentioned.